Organizing for Endangered and Threatened Species Habitat Draft

Home Browse Search

conflicting uses. In the eyes of local users, a big difference between state water users and the federal government is: l. state water users have had to deal with multiple and competing uses for decades and see water in the river as having many uses, some of which they like and some of which they do not; 2. federal agencies have not been hisl:orically involved in the river; and do not have a history of dealing with multiple and competing uses in local areas. They tend to see water as being dedicated to few uses, most especially the preservation of habit for endangered species. In this regard, the federal government has a narrow perspective on how the river should be managed. Locals therefore argued that they must defend historical compromises and allocation arrangements on the rivers that federal representatives were all too willing to overlook. Court litigation is an expensive gamble. The thought of legal minds reasoning from obscure precedent with all too little; knowledge of the implications for delicately balanced water arrangements was all too scary. Juciicial interpretations could easily carve water arrangements in technically, economically, and politically untenable ways. Also, states simply do not have the money for protracted struggle against federal agencies in long successions of cases. All-in-all court imposed "solutions" were to be feared more than anything the Fish and Wildlife Service could come up with in cooperation with local water users. Babbit's Collaborative Strategy Many within federal agencxes have long noted the need to move away from simplistic "command and control" approaches to environmental regulation, and toward more collaborative ecosystem management (Interagency Ecosystem Management Task Force 1996), (Ruckelshaus 1997), (Melious and Thornton 1999; Smith 2000). Given the sheer number of permit renewals to be processed, it was prohibitive to even contemplate an individual case-by-case approach in a complex river basin when no single user organization could provide the collective good that was needed, but each could muster allies in the struggle against constructive engagement with the problem of providing improved ha.bitat. In the politically charged context created by the divisive struggle in the Pacific Northwest over old-growth logging in the domain of the spotted owl, and the broad regional "wise-use move;ment," Clinton's Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbit developed an ambitious plan to abandon trad'xtional command and control approaches to ESA implementation. Policy would consist of: 1. bringing U.S., state, and local governments and resource users together to build comprehensive local negotiated solutions; 2. making partnerships around large regional watershed strategies that would get ahead of the many crises that arose from sequences of isolated ESA consultations; federal authorities did not want to administer the ESA from an individual species perspective anymoxe than local users wanted to renew their water rights permit by permit; 3. providing incentivf;s to water users by providing: a. multi-species listings that anticipated subsequent listings; 47